Quick: Name the once-gorgeous superstar who's been savaged in the press for destroying her good looks, wasting her fortune and ruining her reputation with her "excessive indulgence in love, liquor, lust and laudanum."

Nope, it's not that self-destructive moppet on the cover of Us Weekly or that tearful television interviewee bawling to Diane Sawyer. It's Mrs. B-dd-y, the fallen British society maven whose shocking indiscretions were the subject of a scandalous 1780 publication that was widely distributed among London's upper and working classes.

Apparently, Mrs. B-dd-y, whose sordid affairs were preserved in a pamphlet called "Characters of the Present Most Celebrated Courtesans Exposed, With a Variety of Secret Anecdotes Never Before Published," faced stiff competition for the title of 18th century England's most debauched socialite.

In a 1772 issue of the Town and Country Magazine, or, Universal Repository of Knowledge, Instruction and Entertainment, the yearslong affair between the married Mrs. L-fle and the dashing Lord H-n was chronicled in minute detail, from their initial meeting to the consummation of their love, complete with background information on their friends, spouses and social standing and a finely drawn bust of the comely L-fle gazing adoringly on a dapper H-n.

Then there was Mrs. H-tt-n, a wealthy young heiress and gold digger who was attacked in the pages of "Courtesans" for her "unbounded inclination to the acquisition of money."

While we think of our present-day fascination with the bed-hopping antics of the wealthy and famous as a modern obsession, the musty, oft-thumbed pages of centuries-old publications like the Spectator, "Courtesans," and Town and Country tell a different story.

Hundreds of years before there were glossy celebrity magazines to chronicle the failed marriages and furtive poolside seductions of the attractive and well-born, British society of the 1700s had already given us the fundamental elements of contemporary tabloid culture: an emerging industry of publications dedicated to covering bad celebrity behavior, and an abundance of notorious personalities who were committing it and blabbing about it later - not to mention an increasingly literate readership that was enthralled with it.

"The idea of gossip and scandal and celebrity culture that we have today was really coming into being in 18th century London," said Sophie Gee, the author of the new novel "The Scandal of the Season." "It was a moment when a fascination with celebrity coincided with a number of very great writers wanting to write about celebrity."

Gee, 33, a Sydney-born academic and an assistant professor of English at Princeton, isn't usually found among the stacks at Firestone Library searching for 300-year-old bits of slanderous social ammunition. But such gossip was all but unavoidable as she researched "The Scandal of the Season," a fictionalized account of the true story behind Alexander Pope's 1712 poem, "The Rape of the Lock."

When Pope composed his satirical epic, he was shining a spotlight on a suspected affair between the British aristocrats Arabella Fermor and Lord Robert Petre, two mainstays of the London party scene. (The intrigue became common knowledge when Petre publicly cut off a lock of Fermor's hair.) In doing so, Pope provided the template for today's gossip writers: a middle-class striver who hung on the fringes of patrician circles, privy to upper-class dirt while maintaining his ironic distance.

"Pope quickly got himself a rep for his willingness to launch unsparing attacks on people who offended him," Gee said, "and so it became a big deal for the aristocracy to have him on their side."

British readers did not have to rely solely on epic poetry to satisfy their appetite for gossip. The Spectator, considered the most sophisticated publication of 18th century London, meted out weekly coverage of politics, literature and art - along with a healthy dollop of social scandal - on a single tightly packed page.

"The Spectator discussed new habits people were falling into, and it prided itself on giving these habits new names," Gee explained as she carefully paged through a well-preserved compilation of Spectator back issues. "It would describe the kind of elaborate headdress people had started wearing to the opera, and then mock someone for wearing the wrong kind of wig."

With its erudite celebrity dish and insider's tone, the Spectator was aimed at middle-class readers who used it as a cheat sheet to ingratiate themselves into high society, as well as upper-class types eager to make sure they knew all the latest dirt on their contemporaries. And like its modern-day counterparts, the publication's most frequent targets were also its most reliable informants: women of power who loved to spread rumors about their enemies and foes. "There was a competition among upper-class women about who had the best gossip," Gee said. "They were fantastically catty and loved to see their contemporaries fall."

At the other end of the spectrum, pamphlets like "Characters of the Present Most Celebrated Courtesans" were intended for a working-class audience - scullery maids and serving wenches who would have picked it up at lending libraries - though the gentry enjoyed it as a guilty pleasure, too.

Printed on much cheaper paper than the Spectator, these pamphlets trafficked exclusively in the tales of highborn women who had disgraced themselves in public, ensnaring readers with lurid titles like "The History of Betty Bolaine, the Canterbury Miser," and crude drawings of dissipated women in various stages of physical ruin - the etched equivalents of a bleary-eyed Lindsay Lohan mug shot.

Like today's celebrity weeklies, "Courtesans" feigned concern and moral acuity (see OK's recent description of a Britney Spears meltdown as "heartbreaking") while reveling in the scandal. Of a Mrs. H-tt-n, "Courtesans" says, "She is expensive in dress, extravagant in the indulgence of her palate, violently addicted to wine and strong liquors which she often drinks to excess, not infrequently to intoxication." It then reminds its readers that good conduct is "a perfect security to all indelicate or fornicative consequences."

The authors of "Courtesans" attempted to mask the identities of its subjects by leaving out letters in their surnames, but just as in a Page Six blind item, part of the sport for readers was filling in the blanks. The copy of "Courtesans" at Firestone Library reveals Mrs. H-tt-n to be Mrs. Hutton: An in-the-know reader had penciled in the missing letters.

Though "Courtesans" has long since gone out of print, the 18th century Spectator endures: It evolved into the modern-day British society magazine Tatler (the publication's original name when it was first published in 1709), with much of its roguish sensibility still intact.

"There was always an element of mischief and irony," said Geordie Greig, Tatler's editor. "We're known as the magazine that bites the hand that feeds it."

But if the centuries-old exploits of women long since forgotten have been preserved in academic research and contemporary novels, does that mean that future generations will be reading about the antics of Paris, Lindsay and Britney for hundreds of years to come?